Welcome to the investigative reporting blog of award-winning journalist Alex Roslin, author of the book Police Wife: The Secret Epidemic of Police Domestic Violence. Roslin was president of the board of the Canadian Centre for Investigative Reporting, and his awards include the Arlene Book Award of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, for the book Police Wife. Below are samples of his work.

The families have near-daily get-togethers at each other’s houses for educational and social activities, including workshops on history, geography, theatre and tai chi. They also organize “school field trips” to apple orchards, museums and the science fair. They even hold their own Olympiads.

“It’s a lot of work, but it’s worth it,” Gauthier says.

[Read the full story here. View the story at The Gazette's website here.]

In a nondescript three-storey building on
Cambie Street in the Downtown Eastside, Sherry Grant is at ground zero of a
little-noticed heroin revival.

She hasn’t seen so many kids doing heroin
since the Nexus substance-abuse program, which she runs, started tracking
detailed statistics in 2005.

Nearly two times more of the program’s
young clients aged 14 to 24 say they’re using heroin—35 percent today compared
to 19 percent in 2005. “It’s crazy. We have definitely noticed an increase in
heroin use among youth we work with,” said Grant, whose program is part of the
Boys and Girls Clubs of South Coast B.C. “It’s cheaper and more accessible.”

The clients are getting younger, too. “It
used to be their first time was 18 or 20,” she said. “Now it’s somebody who’s
15.”

After years of declining use, smack is
back. A new generation of addicts—many younger than before—are getting hooked
on a rising tide of heroin pouring into Canada from strife-ridden Afghanistan.

In Vancouver, the number of heroin-related
criminal charges has shot up more than sixfold, from 72 in 2003—the year Canada
sent its first large military contingent to Afghanistan—to 445 in 2009,
according to Vancouver Police Department figures.

The B.C. Coroner’s Office warned on May 5
that the province saw 20 heroin-related overdose deaths in the first four
months of 2011, more than twice the number last year for the same period. The
coroner said that unusually potent heroin may be to blame. But other provinces
are also seeing more heroin and more ODs. And the story is similar across the
U.S., Europe, and Asia.

Canada-wide, police seizures of opium shot
up threefold between 2001 and 2008, from 31.5 kilograms to 96.9 kilos,
according to Health Canada, which tests seized drugs for police forces.
Seizures of heroin, an opium derivative, doubled from 66.6 kilos in 2001 to
133.4 kilos in 2008.

According to UN figures, much of the blame
lies with a 15-fold increase in Afghan opium production since 2001, the year
Canadian soldiers helped the U.S. overthrow the country’s Taliban government.
Afghanistan now supplies 90 percent of the world’s opium.

Increased heroin supply worldwide and
falling prices are the little-noticed side effects of the western presence in
Afghanistan.

Opium, banned under the Taliban regime,
now flourishes in Afghanistan under the noses of Canadian and U.S.
personnel—and often directly under the boots of Canadian soldiers, who are
occasionally pictured in newspapers walking through poppy fields while on the
prowl for Taliban rebels.

Opium generates $1.5 billion to $4 billion
for Afghanistan’s economy each year and accounts for 10 to 50 percent of the
country’s GDP, depending on harvests, according to reports from the UN Office
on Drugs and Crime. Depending on various factors, the poppy employs between 1.5
million and 3.3 million Afghans at different times of the growing season.

A big part of all those billions goes into
the pockets and Dubai bank accounts of Afghan officials and warlords who are
our allies. The Taliban rebels, who are widely accused of profiting from the
opium trade, take in only two to 12 percent of total opium revenue, mostly by
taxing shipments, according to an April 2011 analysis by the journal Foreign
Policy.

One of the most conspicuous manifestations
of opium’s huge role is the Kabul neighbourhood of Sherpur, the country’s
wealthiest enclave. An empty hillside as recently as 2001, Sherpur now boasts
extravagant mansions that Afghans dub “poppy palaces” and “narcotecture”.

All this prompted Hillary Clinton to call
Afghanistan a “narco state” during the confirmation hearing prior to her
appointment as U.S. secretary of state.

But that hasn’t stopped Canadian and other
western governments from cultivating friendly ties with Afghan officials and
warlords known or strongly suspected to be involved in the flourishing opium
trade.

One of Canada’sclosest allies in Afghanistan is the
so-called King of Kandahar—Ahmed Wali Karzai, the half brother of President
Harmid Karzai. Often known by his initials, AWK, he is the powerful head of the
provincial council in Kandahar province, where Canada’s 2,800 soldiers are
headquartered.

He is also widely suspected of being
linked to opium trafficking. An October 2009 U.S. diplomatic cable released by
the whistle-blowing group WikiLeaks in November 2010 said AWK “is widely
understood to be corrupt and a narcotics trafficker”.

Reports about Wali Karzai go back years. A
2006Newsweekinvestigation quoted sources saying
AWK was a “major figure” in the opium trade. One Afghan Interior Ministry
official said he “leads the whole trafficking structure” in the country’s
south.

(Wali Karzai has denied the claims of drug
involvement, saying there’s no proof.)

He has also been accused of vote-rigging
in the 2009 Afghan presidential election and engaging in widespread corruption.

And despite it all, U.S. and Canadian
officials have entertained cozy ties with Wali Karzai. He has reportedly
received payments from the CIA, the New York Times stated in 2009. He was also
said to be renting a large compound outside Kandahar to the CIA and U.S.
special forces. “He’s our landlord,” one U.S. official was quoted as telling
the newspaper.

Wali Karzai has denied he’s on the CIA
payroll, but he acknowledges passing intelligence to coalition forces. “I’m the
only one who has the majority of intelligence in this region,” he told the
Times last year. “I’m passing tons of information to them.”

That intel seems to have helped shield
Wali Karzai from awkward questions about his alleged drug ties. “U.S. and
Canadian diplomats have not pressed the matter, in part because Ahmed Wali
Karzai has given valuable intelligence to the U.S. military, and he also
routinely provides assistance to Canadian forces, according to several
officials familiar with the issue,” the Washington Post reported in 2009.

Wali Karzai is far from being the only
Karzai with seemingly dirty hands. Another U.S. diplomatic cable, from April
2009, also released by WikiLeaks last November, said that President Karzai has
personally intervened in several drug cases. In one, he reportedly pardoned
five Afghan policemen convicted of transporting 124 kilos of heroin.

President Karzai also raised eyebrows in
2007 when he appointed a convicted heroin dealer, Izzatullah Wasifi, as his
government’s anticorruption chief. “The Kabul government is dependent on opium
to sustain its own hold on power,” wrote Thomas Schweich, the former U.S.
counternarcotics coordinator in Kabul, in aNew
York TimesMagazine story in
2008.

Canada’s largestdevelopment project in Afghanistan may
actually be fuelling the opium boom. Ottawa calls it Canada’s “signature
project” in the country: a $50-million scheme to rebuild the country’s
second-largest dam, the Dahla Dam, and a long-neglected network of irrigation
canals in Afghanistan’s main breadbasket region.

This region of fertile farmland also
happens to be Kandahar’s main opium-growing belt, according to the UN’s 2010
Afghan Opium Survey.

One of the districts that have benefited
from the Canadian irrigation scheme is Zhari, just west of Kandahar City. Since
2008, when the Canadian project began, Zhari has emerged as one of
Afghanistan’s key opium-growing areas. Opium cultivation there shot up by 70
percent from 2,923 hectares in 2008 to 4,978 in 2010, according to the UN
survey.

The Dahla Dam itself is located in a
district called Shah Wali Kot, just northeast of Kandahar City. Opium
cultivation there has risen 45 percent since the Canadian project started, from
560 hectares in 2008 to 813 hectares last year.

In Kandahar province as a whole, opium
production remained flat from 2005 to 2008, averaging about 14,000 hectares.
Then it suddenly shot up to 20,000 hectares in 2009 and almost 26,000 last
year.

Findings from the UN’s Office on Drugs and
Crime show that opium growers are benefiting from the rebuilt irrigation canals
and ditches. Its2007 Afghan
Opium Surveyreported that
37 percent of villages getting irrigation aid or other external assistance were
cultivating opium.

Halfway aroundthe world, more and more of this opium is
finding its way to Canada. Our heroin used to come mostly from Southeast Asia’s
“golden triangle”: Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam. That started to change
after 2001 when Afghanistan emerged as Canada’s number one supplier, according
to the RCMP’s annual drug reports.

By happy coincidence, B.C. has been
partially buffered from the impacts. Vancouver Coastal Health had already
started to ramp up spending on addiction treatment due to a spike in heroin
overdoses in the 1990s.

VCH also funds and operates (with the PHS
Community Services Society) the Downtown Eastside’s Insite supervised-injection
facility, which cut OD deaths in the surrounding area by more than one-third,
according to a study published on April 18 in British medical journal theLancet. (That hasn’t stopped
the Harper government from trying to close Insite. The Supreme Court of Canada
is expected to rule later this year on whether or not Ottawa can revoke
Insite’s permit to operate, which has been upheld in two lower-court
decisions.)

Meanwhile, there are signs of a heroin
comeback. “Heroin is making a bit of a resurgence,” Sgt. Shinder Kirk of the
Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit–B.C. said by phone from his office in
Surrey.

The number of Native people in Vancouver
who died of illicit-drug overdoses went up from eight in 2001 to 14 in 2005
(the latest available data), according to a 2007 report for the Canadian
Community Epidemiology Network on Drug Use.

B.C. students saw a “small but significant
increase” in heroin use between 2003 and 2008, the nonprofit McCreary Centre
Society’s “Adolescent Health Survey” reported in 2008.

Despite the extra moneyfor addiction services, fewer heroin users
are getting treatment. In 2001, only 18 percent of injection-drug users in
Vancouver had access to services like detox, a recovery house, counselling, or
a treatment centre. That number fell to seven percent in 2007, according to a
2009 report from the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS.

The centre’s report also found that more
injection-drug users were homeless (13 percent in 2001 versus 24 percent in
2007), and more had HIV (0.6 percent in 2001 compared to 2.4 percent in 2007).

The numbers underscore growing problems
for heroin users, said Dave Murray, a volunteer at the Vancouver Area Network
of Drug Users. Murray himself used heroin for 15 years. “I lost everything I
owned. I generally went into a ditch,” he said, speaking over his cellphone as
he walked through the Downtown Eastside, where he lives.

He gave up heroin three or four years ago
and now advocates for better services for heroin users.

Based on what he sees on the streets,
Murray said, he believes that more young people have been doing heroin in
Vancouver in recent years. And he said it’s getting harder for them to find
help, especially since the closure of the Miracle Valley substance-abuse
treatment centre outside Mission last year. “There are not enough treatment
spaces, that’s for sure,” he said.

Heroin users typically wait one to three
months for a spot in a provincially funded treatment centre, Murray said. “What
do we do with the person while they’re waiting?” he asked. A user who has gone
through detox should have a “seamless” entry into a residential treatment
facility to have any chance of getting clean, he said. “If the person goes back
out into the community, chances are he will fail.”

After finishing a treatment program, users
can stay at a recovery house—a residence where they can try to get back on
their feet, find a job, and get away from old habits. But Murray said many
recovery houses in B.C. are “terribly run”, and recovering users there live in
“poor conditions”. Instead of closing, Murray said, Insite should be expanded.
The centre has room for only 12 injectors at a time—hardly enough for the
neighbourhood’s estimated 5,000 injection-drug users.

Murray is also troubled by the fast-rising
number of heroin-related arrests by Vancouver police. He thinks it suggests
there’s a new generation of heroin users out there who aren’t showing up yet in
other data. It also means the city is flouting its Four Pillars drug strategy
of prioritizing treatment, prevention, and harm reduction rather than
criminalizing users, he said.

“They’re putting more money into
enforcement; they’re building more prisons. Vancouver talks about Four Pillars.
It’s one pillar and three toothpicks. Three-quarters of the money goes to
enforcement,” he said.

Vancouver police didn’t respond to aStraightrequest for comment.

Other provinces in Canada are also seeing
a growing heroin problem. In Toronto, the portion of Grade 7 to 12 students who
reported using heroin in the previous year almost doubled, from 0.6 to 1.1
percent, between 2001 and 2007, according to the Toronto-based Centre for
Addiction and Mental Health.

But Canada’s heroin woes pale beside those
of Afghanistan itself. It has an estimated one million opiate addicts—eight
percent of the population. It’s another way the fates of ordinary Canadians and
Afghans have become joined in the past 10 years. After all, a poppy palace
doesn’t come cheap.

[This story won the Canadian Association of Journalists award for best investigative reporting in a Canadian magazine in 2010. See the Georgia Straight site's version of the story here.]

At the end of a gravel road 20 kilometres
east of Fort St. John, Arlene Laughren’s house used to be her little piece of
heaven.

Now it’s like a prison.

Laughren moved here six years ago with her
husband, Keith Holmes, to raise horses, llamas, sheep, and chickens and to grow
vegetables on a 66-hectare hobby farm amid the picturesque coulees, hills, and
ravines by the Peace River.

Now most of the animals are gone and her
garden is overgrown with tall weeds. Laughren, 53, is stuck at home while her
husband is away at work. She has brain damage, memory loss, and poor balance.
She can no longer drive and hasn’t worked in more than two years—ever since she
got two brain abscesses after eating a bad ham sandwich.

It was July 2008 when Laughren ate the ham
produced by Maple Leaf Foods while at the Fort St. John hospital. She was
getting treatment related to Crohn’s disease, which she has had since
childhood. Her medication suppressed her immune system and made her more
vulnerable to the Listeria monocytogenes bacteria on the ham.

Four days after the fateful meal, violent
headaches started and she began to feel dizzy. After two falls, hospital staff
gave her a CAT scan and saw something abnormal in her brain. Laughren was flown
by air ambulance to Vancouver, where she had brain surgery. Doctors traced the
abscesses to the ham, and she was diagnosed with the bacterial infection
listeriosis. She remained in a Vancouver hospital for five months of treatment,
followed by six weeks of rehabilitation.

Two years later, Laughren says doctors
told her she will never work again. She used to counsel youth with difficulties
at the Fort St. John high school. “I really miss them,” she says.

Laughren was one of hundreds of Canadians
sickened—many with gastroenteritis—in the 2008 Maple Leaf listeria outbreak,
which caused 57 confirmed cases of listeriosis. Twenty-three died, including
one in B.C., and many, like Laughren, suffered permanent disabilities. A
government inquiry into the fiasco placed much of the blame on numerous
shortcomings in the government’s food-safety system.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency was
especially singled out. The so-called Weatherill inquiry said it didn’t have
enough meat inspectors and was poorly managed. For four years, inspectors had
failed to do all of the required audits of the Toronto Maple Leaf plant that
produced the tainted meat. The inquiry made 57 recommendations for
improvements.

But more than a year later, food
scientists and the CFIA’s own meat inspectors say that most of the
recommendations have yet to be adopted and that Canada’s food supply may not be
safer than before.

If anything, they say the level of
inspection of deli meats—the kind involved in the Maple Leaf episode—may
actually have declined. Meanwhile, the numbers of food poisonings and recalls
are rising. And new, controversial methods of producing meat are increasing the
risk of food-borne illnesses even more while raising other questions about the
meat on our plates.

“The rates of listeria recalls in recent
years are amazing. It’s one after the other. The rates are going up; recalls
are going up. Something is fundamentally wrong,” says Kevin Allen, an assistant
professor of food microbiology at the University of British Columbia.

“It’s safe to say some of the sanitation
methods are not working as they should,” he says in a phone interview from his
office. “There is a lack of control in the food-production process.”

Since the 2004 fiscal year, Canada has
seen a steady rise in the number of meat and poultry recalls each year,
according to data provided by the CFIA (which would not grant an interview to
theGeorgia Straight).
The number has more than doubled, from 44 in 2004 to 91 in 2008. B.C. has been
especially hard hit by food recalls. It experienced 605 recalls of all types of
food, including meat and poultry, between 2004 and 2008—or 26 percent of the
national total. Yet B.C. has only 13 percent of Canada’s population.

And because most food-borne illnesses
never come to the government’s attention, the reported cases represent just a
tiny fraction of all the food poisonings—only one out of every 300 to 350
actual cases, according to the Maple Leaf inquiry. In fact, food-borne
illnesses sicken a whopping 11 to 13 million Canadians each year, according to
the Public Health Agency of Canada, and as many as 500 may die as a result.

Why are foodpoisonings skyrocketing? Bob Kingston
has a good idea why: a hobbled meat-inspection system that’s a shadow of its
former self and that struggles to keep up with the fast-changing food industry.
If anything, he says, meat inspectors are even more taxed now than before the
Maple Leaf disaster.

Kingston worked for almost 30 years as a
federal quarantine inspector in Burnaby before becoming president of the
9,500-member Agriculture Union, which includes federal meat inspectors. Earlier
this year, his union gave Canada’s food-safety system a failing grade for
heeding so few of the Maple Leaf inquiry’s recommendations.

“You’re up to five or six plants per
inspector. I know inspectors who have told me they are responsible for 10
plants. If they actually want enforcement, it’s way over the top,” he says.

“All you have time to do is glance at the
paperwork, see if it’s fine, and race to the next plant. If you have to do an
enforcement action, good luck finding time to do it.”

The problem comes down to time. It takes
about 800 hours (or 20 weeks of full-time work) to meet inspection requirements
for a single processed-meat plant, according to union estimates. That doesn’t
include hundreds of additional hours needed for certifying imports and exports,
plus leave or vacation time.

“I feel for the inspectors,” says UBC’s
Allen. “Many are faced with an unruly workload. They’re really taxed right
now.”

According to the Weatherill inquiry,
government inspectors assigned to the Toronto Maple Leaf plant “appear to have
been stressed due to their responsibilities at other plants”. In September
2009, with a possible federal election looming, Ottawa promised to hire 70 new
meat inspectors to fill shortfalls identified in the inquiry. A year later,
only 40 of the new positions have been filled. Much of the money for the new
hires was simply taken out of other CFIA operations, Kingston says;
penny-pinching at the agency is so tight that it has cancelled training
initiatives and some offices have no money for pens or paper.

Even our neighbours are taking notice.
Last year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture told Canada it wasn’t meeting
U.S. standards for inspecting processed meat destined for export south of the
border. It demanded that Canadian meat inspectors check up on exporting plants
once every 12 hours, as U.S. standards require.

Canada increased the level of checks to
that standard. Meanwhile, plants making processed meat for Canadians are
inspected at the far more leisurely pace of only once a week. The CFIA says
inspectors spend more time during each of their weekly inspections of the
plants with Canadian-destined meat, so the total amount of inspection time is
the same as for U.S.–destined meat.

Kingston says this is “highly unlikely”.
He notes that the CFIA would have needed the equivalent of 50 extra full-time
inspectors to meet the greater frequency of USDA-mandated inspections. If the
level of inspection was really the same, he says, no new hires would have been
needed.

He also says plants visited more often
tend to have better safety records. “If an inspector comes once a day, a plant
behaves totally differently than when they know the inspector is coming only
once a week,” he says.

Because there is little money for the new
hires, the extra USDA-mandated inspections have resulted in astronomical levels
of overtime for the CFIA’s existing 260 processed-meat inspectors, Kingston
says. The additional burden means many inspectors are now faced with an even
greater workload than before 2008, he says.

It wasn’t always like this. The
food-safety system and meat industry have both undergone a sea change since
1981, when Kingston became a union rep for federal agriculture department
employees, including meat inspectors. (He moved to the CFIA when it was created
in 1997.)

In the 1980s, beef was usually butchered
by hand in a large number of small meat-processing plants spread across the
country. Each one had a federal meat inspector assigned to oversee it
full-time. Mechanization of slaughterhouse operations and processing started to
transform the industry in the late 1980s and 1990s. Machines run by low-wage
operators started to replace trained butchers. The small plants were consolidated
into fewer, large operations—some on a massive scale. One plant in Alberta
processes 2,000 beef carcasses in a single day. Another in Manitoba goes
through 10,000 pigs daily.

The machines might be more efficient, but
they’re also less able than a human hand to butcher an animal in a way that
avoids contaminating it with bacteria-laden feces, Kingston says. Also, when
there was a bacteria outbreak at one of the smaller plants, it was usually
pretty limited in scope. “Now if you do half a day’s run [of tainted product]
out of one of these big plants, you’ve contaminated half the continent,”
Kingston says.

These were also the lean years of Brian
Mulroney’s budget cutbacks and deregulation. Ottawa was only too happy to
acquiesce to industry demands to reduce the burden of meat inspection.
Inspectors now found themselves responsible for several facilities each, as
opposed to one, even as the plants ballooned in size.

At the same time, inspectors got go-easy
marching orders. Previously, when inspectors saw a problem—like unsanitary
conditions—they’d pull the plug on operations or slow production until the
issue was fixed.

Starting in 2005, the federal government
took the deregulation a step further by quietly implementing a new food-safety
system that shifted much of the burden of policing to the meat industry.
Instead of shutting down a dirty facility, inspectors were instructed to issue
a “corrective action request”. A meat processor would now usually have 14 days
to respond with an explanation of how it would deal with the issue—and would,
in most cases, have another 60 days to implement changes. Companies can request
time extensions past the initial 60 days. They are routinely granted, Kingston
says.

An inspector who shuts down a meat plant
today “would probably be disciplined unless he has approval from five levels of
management. He would be accused of being overzealous,” Kingston says.

The new meat-inspection regimen was
slammed in the Maple Leaf inquiry, which said it was plagued by a shortage of
inspectors, poor planning, mismanagement, and lack of training for supervisors.
The Weatherill inquiry called on the CFIA to audit its new system; it is not
clear if that audit is still under way.

At the same timeas Canada deregulated meat production,
other innovations were altering the very composition of the meat we eat and
creating new challenges for food safety. One of the greatest changes was
finding a profitable new use for fatty layers at the outer surfaces of a cow
carcass, known in the industry as “bench trim”.

Once used mostly for pet food and cooking
oil, the fatty trimmings are now widely used in hamburger in Canada and the
U.S. The trimmings are combined with leaner cuts from many different cows,
frequently from various countries, theNew
York Timesreported in an
October 2009 investigation. Author Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation)
wrote inRolling Stoneback in 1998 that one U.S. fast-food
burger patty may contain meat from 40 to 100 different cows raised in as many
as six different countries.

The low-grade cuts are more susceptible to
E. coli bacterial contamination because they come from parts of the cow that
are more likely to come into contact with feces. Trimmings were at the centre
of controversy in the U.S. last year after illness outbreaks linked to tainted
hamburger. The outbreaks prompted U.S. authorities to tighten inspection of
bench trim.

More controversy has surrounded “meat
glue”. The “glue” is a natural protein derived from cow or pig blood. It allows
meat processors to stick together various lumps of meat into a regular-looking
steak, roast, or kebab. In the meat business, it’s known as “restructured beef”.

Canada allows the product to be sold here,
but the European parliament rejected it for sale in the EU in May because of
concerns that artificial steaks could mislead the public. “Consumers in Europe
should be able to trust that they are buying a real steak or ham, not pieces of
meat that have been glued together,” Jo Lienen, chair of the parliament’s
environment committee, said during debate on the issue.

The glue also raises food-safety issues,
says Keith Warriner, an associate professor of food science at the University
of Guelph, in a phone interview from his office. If there is a bacteria
outbreak, it’s much harder to figure out the source when chunks of meat from
multiple cows were combined.

Also, the products need to be fully
cooked, like ground beef, to kill bacteria. A regular steak is safe to eat
medium-rare because only its surface has bacteria. But when different cuts of
meat are blended together, the product may have contaminated surfaces on the
inside, and it has to be cooked to an internal temperature of 71 ° C (160 ° F).
This, Warriner says, could lead to confusion among consumers used to cooking
their steaks medium-rare (63 ° C, or 145 ° F).

Yet another innovation is “modified
atmosphere packaging”, the widespread practice of filling meat packaging with
adjusted levels of oxygen and other gases. The gases can keep meat from losing
its fresh-looking red hue. Shiv Chopra, an Ottawa food-safety expert and
retired Health Canada scientist, said in an e-mail that the technique is
“dangerous” because it may prevent shoppers from seeing when meat has gone bad.
UBC’s Allen agreed: “This can be misleading to consumers.”

It all adds up to huge challenges for a
tattered food-safety system. Kingston predicts more Maple Leaf–type incidents.
“It’s inevitable that more of this comes along if nothing changes.”

Back at herhome outside Fort St. John, Laughren
is disheartened. “The one thing I thought would come from this is they would
improve food safety. But I don’t think there has been much of anything done.”

She gazes longingly at the horse saddle
hanging on a saddle rack in her living room. She used to ride in amateur
competitions, but now she doesn’t have enough coordination to ride a horse. She
is still waiting to receive part of a $27-million payout that Maple Leaf agreed
to make last year to settle several class-action lawsuits related to the
listeria outbreak. With thousands of claimants expected, the processing of
claims has been a time-consuming task.

Meanwhile, the Canada Revenue Agency is
hounding her husband for writing off his stay in Vancouver while he helped
Laughren recover from her brain surgery. Despite a doctor’s letter saying her
husband’s presence “was imperative for her treatment”, the taxman nixed the
write-off and is demanding back taxes.

“You just expect the government to be
watching our backs. But that’s silly,” Laughren says.

Her memory loss means she sometimes
forgets things like friends’ names and her phone number, but there’s one thing
she always remembers: her decision to never eat processed meat again.

Winner of the Arlene Book Award of the American Society of Journalists and Authors

Click the image to buy "Police Wife" on Amazon

About Alex Roslin

Alex Roslin is an award-winning journalist who was president of the board of the Canadian Centre for Investigative Reporting. He won the American Society of Journalists and Authors' Arlene Book Award for Writing that Makes a Difference for the first edition of the book "Police Wife: The Secret Epidemic of Domestic Violence," which he co-authored.

The book was also the runner-up for the Hollywood Book Festival non-fiction book award, won silver in the eLit Book Awards and bronze in the INDIEFAB Book of the Year Awards and was a finalist in the Next Generation Indie Book Awards. Roslin is the author of the updated and revised second edition of "Police Wife."

Roslin has also won three Canadian Association of Journalists prizes for investigative reporting and 10 nominations for CAJ awards and National Magazine Awards, including one for his story "Killer Cop" about RCMP Constable Jocelyn Hotte's murder of his ex-girlfriend Lucie Gélinas.

He has worked as an associate producer for the CBC-TV investigative programs the fifth estate and Disclosure and has written for The Montreal Gazette, The Financial Post, The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, Maclean's, L'Actualité, The Georgia Straight, Zoomer, Canadian Geographic, Today's Parent and many others.

He is chair of the nominations and awards committee of the Professional Writers Association of Canada.